Published 4:00 am, Monday, September 18, 2006

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip:

Drama. 10 p.m. Mondays, NBC.

The Class: Comedy. 8 p.m.

Mondays, CBS.

As the new fall television season begins -- a handful of shows have already been sneaked, but tonight is the official start -- it's only fitting that Aaron Sorkin, whose reverence for intelligence and fast-paced action has already given TV two quality offerings in "The West Wing" and "Sports- Night" -- returns with the most talked about new freshman series.

"Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" lives up to the advance hype, easily qualifying as one of the best new broadcast series of the fall. What's most impressive, however, is how "Studio 60" seems so ripe for knocking down -- couple the hype and the all-star cast with one of the least successful genres, the inside-baseball show-within-a-TV-show -- and you have all the markings of failure. And yet, "Studio 60" not only hits one out of the park for 60 full minutes, it instantly makes you realize just how damned good Sorkin was in the first place and how much he's been missed in the television landscape.

"Studio 60" -- in case you've been under that proverbial rock -- is a behind-the-scenes look at a late-night sketch comedy series that appears awfully similar to "Saturday Night Live" (and yes, this series airs on NBC). If Sorkin captured all the frantic action and lower-budget hipness of a place like ESPN when he did "Sports- Night" -- a series that showed great love not only for the profession of live television but of sports and scrappy cable channels -- he turns here to the darker side of broadcast television, where all the networks are owned by huge corporations and money matters more than art (or even the love of the game, as we witnessed in "SportsNight").

There's a real logic to this jump, even though Sorkin has been deftly deflecting comparisons to real life (his -- both personal and professional). His departure from NBC and the helm of "The West Wing" was uglier and more complicated than is generally understood. While it's true that Sorkin was busted with a number of illegal drugs as he tried to pass through Burbank airport, his real woes began when he essentially wrote every "West Wing" episode and couldn't delegate. His alleged tardiness on scripts cost NBC money and was reportedly the center of his conflict with NBC. You can guess who won that.

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If time really does heal all wounds then, well, welcome back Aaron Sorkin, to the Peacock. This, too, makes a weird kind of sense. NBC is struggling. What it needs most is a hit, but also a real classy, smart offering. Who better to deliver those goods? And yet what Sorkin has given NBC is a series that unflinchingly looks at how the sausage gets made not only on a weekly television series, but how corporate bosses -- many of them with no working knowledge of the artistic side of the industry -- are put in charge of entertaining the country. (This theme is repeated more blatantly in Tina Fey's comedy "30 Rock," also on NBC, and featuring Alec Baldwin as a cutthroat corporate no-man sent to slash costs on the entertainment side of the business).

In "Studio 60," Sorkin starts with the audaciously close-to-home notion that a staple series (in this case, the fictional "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip") is no longer funny. Never mind that this has been said with some frequency in past years about "Saturday Night Live." We see Judd Hirsch playing Wes Mendell, the beaten down creator and producer of the series trying to get funny material on the air while a network drone from standards and practices tells him he can't run a particular sketch. The alternative is to run a not-very-funny sketch that offends no one but people with a sense of humor and sophistication. A massive "Network"-like meltdown occurs, live on television, and the network finds itself boxed into a corner. Jack Rudolph (Steven Weber), the head of the fictional National Broadcasting System, immediately fires Mendell and thus looks like the humorless corporate bean counter he is.

But he's already hired a new entertainment president, Jordan McDeere (Amanda Peet) that day, and drops the mess in her lap. Or, more accurately, Jordan rises to the occasion to put things right (and make a name for herself), and insists the network and "Studio 60" immediately rehire Matthew Albie (Matthew Perry) and Daniel Tripp (Bradley Whitford), the writer-producer combo who ran the show in its heyday but were unceremoniously fired by Rudolph.

Here's where the drama in a comedy begins.

"Studio 60" is smart -- immediately smarter than most broadcast dramas in the room -- and it's passionate. Matt and Danny represent all that's good about creative freedom on television and Rudolph is the Big Bad of corporate bottom lines. This allows Sorkin to pontificate and lecture about the clash of art and commerce -- a subject he's intimate with -- and he nails it with vigor and glory. Though there's some merit in accusing Sorkin of a propensity to lecture, to write grandiose, overly dramatic speeches that are either heart-rending or fiery and political, that has always been a dubious accusation when you consider that, hell, he does it like nobody else. Television could use a lot more soapbox lectures in place of predictable (and hacky) dialogue, provided they're done right.

The worrisome aspect about "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" is not Sorkin bleating on about television like he did the politics of "The West Wing." The man is talented enough to ramble on about postage stamps and make it goose-bump great. No, the worry is that shining a light backstage and onto the inner workings of television will bore those people who just want to watch the bastard machine, not dissect it. But this is the same kind of inside-baseball knock Sorkin got for "SportsNight" and "The West Wing," and history says he did just fine with those.

With Perry and Whitford providing superb acting (Perry will no doubt surprise a lot of people) and a deep and talented cast, there's much to like about "Studio 60." (For those who will quibble with young and beautiful Peet playing an idealistic and powerful network president, it's wise to remember that the TV industry is filled with women just like her in real life and the Jordan McDeere character is allegedly based on Jamie Tarses, who ran ABC and was younger then than Peet is now.)

There are a plethora of really wonderful new dramas in the coming fall season, but only one or two look to rise to the lofty heights that "Studio 60" and Sorkin establish right out of the gate. So, on the first official night of the new fall season, you might just see the best it has to offer.

Less exciting is a new CBS comedy from two producers (David Crane, "Friends," and Jeffrey Klarik, "Mad About You") that ought to be a whole lot funnier given that pedigree. It's not. Part of the problem comes from the premise -- a group of onetime third-graders, now twentysomethings (go figure) are randomly pulled back together. Yes, third grade. That's where Ethan (Jason Ritter) first met his fiancee 20 years ago. Cute, no? Anyway, he calls everyone in the class and they, in turn, prove to be a predictably disparate bunch. But they all show up anyway to surprise Ethan's fiancee, who promptly dumps Ethan, leaving him alone with a bunch of strangers from third grade.

And yet -- you guessed it -- there's something about the reunion that sparks new relationships. The laugh track here would have you believe that everything these former third-graders say is outrageously funny. It's not.

The best that "The Class" can muster is a kind of cookie-cutter familiarity (also known as lameness) that gets prodded by the laugh track to make everyone at home feel like a good time is being had. It's not.

Skip this class and learn a bigger truth about the TV industry by watching "Studio 60" instead.

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